


Three Heresies

by Poetry



Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Genre: Bechdel Test Pass, Female Friendship, Gen, POV Second Person, Post-Series, Supernatural Elements, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-13
Updated: 2010-12-13
Packaged: 2017-10-13 16:12:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/139192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Poetry/pseuds/Poetry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What the witch queen and the fallen angel have is not quite a friendship. It is something deeper, and more strange.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Three Heresies

**Author's Note:**

> Contains five blink-and-you'll-miss-them crossovers with other small fandoms. I'll let you, the reader, discover them for yourself. BR'd by blueyeti.

**I.**

The first time the angel comes back to visit, you are flying across the ocean to Nova Zembla.

You don't blink or waver or lose your balance. Xaphania appears to you gradually, like an idea forming in the back of your mind. First she is a distant spark, then an expanding nimbus, like gold dust borne on an approaching wind. You can't quite define how you know that the angel is Xaphania. The great golden shimmer in the air resolves into a winged figure, as young and old and inscrutable as any other angel. There are no distinctive ticks of color on her flight feathers, and her face looks like it was imagined by someone who learned about human features from ancient statues. She is revealed to you, slowly, by how her intellect snags at everything - the air, the glassy sea, your cloud pine - like a sharp hook.

"Hello, Xaphania," you say. "I didn't expect you to visit."

"It is important that I visit your world." Her voice is impassive, her wingbeats sending only the slightest of shivers through the air. "I am an ambassador."

"An ambassador? On whose behalf?" For a moment, you think - you hope - that Xaphania has brought a message from Mary Malone, your sister on another world. But the angel would not intervene on an individual's behalf. Her intentions are good, but you remember how pitilessly she condemned Will and Lyra to worlds apart.

"The Republic of Heaven."

"Asriel coined that name, did he not? My sisters and I talk of it differently. A witch clan is not a republic." On the horizon, you spot the first wind-scoured rocks of Nova Zembla, though you had felt it and tasted it in the air before Xaphania appeared. "We call it Suvi's Clan."

"What does that name mean?"

"Suvi Lukeanen was a witch of old fable. She could read anything - a pinch of earth, an upturned pebble, a mortal soul. Each clan has its own tales about her. My clan tells of her love for her dæmon, Lentäjä. She knew him so well she guessed what his true form would be before he settled. She counted all his feathers and knew how many wingbeats it would take for him to fly around the world."

"Self-awareness," says Xaphania.

"Yes."

A wind blows from the north, and with it the whisper of Kaisa's wings, which only you can hear. You close your eyes and listen. He is flying with his brothers over the Arctic ice. They are tracing the scars left by the rift between worlds, cleaning the debris from the wounds. Kaisa has found a bird from Cittàgazze that was stranded here, helpless in the freezing air of another world…

The wind blows past. When you open your eyes, the angel is gone.

 **II.**

You wash the afterbirth and blood from your hands in the water. It drips off your hands and freezes, your fingers tipped with icicles like claws. A golden shadow falls across the water; you shake the ice from your hands and look up.

The angel hovers above like a great silent insect. You are almost annoyed. If Xaphania were a physical being, you would have heard her coming minutes ago.

"I smell new life," Xaphania says.

"I just delivered Iorek Byrnison's first cub. A little she-bear." You let out a breath; it doesn't steam in the air. "He was disappointed."

"How did you respond?"

"I told him that if women have dæmons, perhaps she-bears might forge armor. He told me that bears are neither human nor witch."

"All thinking beings are producers of Dust. There are worlds where even the rivers can speak, and love, and fly like silver ribbons."

You try to imagine it: a river rising from its bed and taking flight. If you had seen such a thing in your travels, you would have flown beside it, the winds of another world unfurling your hair. The world suddenly feels too small, the patterns of air and water too familiar. You have flown every current from Zululand to Nippon, lived among Tartars and Texans and ice bears, and it is not enough.

You look up at Xaphania. "When you first appeared to me, it was as if you were flying toward me from a great distance. But you did not fly through the sky. You broached it, like a veil."

"You wish to know how to travel between worlds." The air does not stir beneath Xaphania's wings. You wonder if the angel doesn't so much travel between worlds as skim across their surfaces, like a drop of oil on water. "I can only tell you the thought behind the action. The doing of it is yours."

"I understand."

"There is a heretic in your world, an experimental theologian. His heresy is that there are six dimensions beyond the four you experience, all folded in on themselves. When one learns to travel along one of these hidden dimensions, it is possible to move orthogonal to reality, like a beam of light passing through a windowpane. The different worlds you have seen are exactly that - windowpanes, less than a thought's breadth apart. There is another world just infinitesimally that way." Xaphania stares into the cold air, as if this reality were diaphanous enough to see through to the next.

You lift the veil from your eyes, the way you taught Mary to see her dæmon. You can see the Dust dancing just beneath Xaphania's unearthly face. You can feel the distant heart-tug from Kaisa as he sits in conference with the dæmons of another clan. These things you sense, but you do not see a world beyond your own.

"Your senses are steeped in this world, not any other. You notice what is around you, not what is beyond you."

You allow your perceptions of the world to fade away, like a coastline behind a shroud of mist. It is not like you to distance yourself like this from the surroundings. The world seems more tenuous now, strangely flat and not quite there. There is something _else_. You know this feeling; you felt it when you first saw the light spilling across the bridge from Cittàgazze. You know, deep down, what belongs to your reality and what does not; the skin of another world rasps against your senses like the screams of cliff-ghasts. Your breath hitches, and the calm you need to maintain the trance abruptly breaks.

Xaphania has landed, her feet not even dimpling the snow. She is watching you intently.

"Do all worlds feel like that to you?" you ask. "Is there any world truly your own?"

"I did, once, when I was mortal." This is the closest the angel has ever come to showing emotion, though you can't force the expression on her face into any of the labels for feelings you know. "Now that world feels like all the rest."

Xaphania drifts into the air, and in the light of the Arctic sky she seems hollow, somehow, like a soap bubble in the shape of an angel. She steeples her wings up around her torso, and in the brief moment before she disappears, you can see her as she once was. There is no word in any language you know for what you see; all you can say is that she is a thing with feathers, and she is singing a hymn that has never had words.

 **III.**

You don't often sleep, but with Kaisa here, his feathers soft beneath your fingers, you long to dream. You are nestled high in the branches of a fir, a dusting of needles in your hair. Sleep is making your thoughts slither away, leaving your mind smooth and blank. Kaisa murmurs the word "lullaby" in every language you know; this takes him many minutes, and over the course of that time you become aware of the now-familiar sensation of Xaphania floating overhead.

"It is my honor to meet an angel at last," Kaisa says.

"You already have," Xaphania replies. The angel's wingspan is more than double Kaisa's. You have never felt small beside her before.

"How goes the Republic of Heaven?" you ask.

"There is not yet enough Dust made to balance the loss."

"I was not asking for a mathematical answer." Mathematics is for men like Dr. Lanselius, who like to see the world accounted for. It is not enough to satisfy you.

"Lie back against the tree and close your eyes." Xaphania perches on a branch above and to the left of you. She folds her vast wings behind her. "I shall tell you a fable."

You wonder what sort of fable a being like Xaphania could tell. Those wings of hers have swept through the sulfurous air that filled this world when it first began. You relax into the tree's embrace; Kaisa settles against your legs, a reassuring weight between your knees. You close your eyes, and let all the sounds of the forest fade. Xaphania's voice is the only one you hear.

"Lord Asriel called this venture of which you and I are a part 'The Republic of Heaven.' I prefer to call it the Rebellion. Lucifer, and I, and all our fallen angels rejected the rule of the Authority. That was how the Rebellion began. It will never end so long as Dust falls into the chasm between the worlds."

"Tell me about the Fall."

"That I cannot do, not when you have so much left to learn. You cannot imagine Kaisa falling from the sky, nor can you imagine what it was to fall from grace."

"Then tell me of rebellions on other worlds, both great and small. You promised me a fireside tale."

"I did. Have you practiced seeing into other worlds?"

"Yes." The feel of other worlds is still caustic to your senses, but it becomes a little easier to brush against them each time. "I catch glimpses."

"My presence here makes the barrier a little thinner. You will see more clearly than you have before. The stories will tell themselves."

Kaisa spreads his wings over you, and you slip into the trance. The feeling of elsewhere whispers all around you. You peer through the veil of this world, and what you see makes you tremble, though you know not why.

You see a child in a prince's finery watering a rose, his love for the flower shining through in how delicately he lets the water fall. You see two people in a tent camped on an endless plain of ice and snow, alone but for their companionship in one another. You hear a hawk's cry of pain quieted as the girl who loves him splints his broken wing. You feel the fastnesses of a silver ocean stirring as a thousand shimmer-scaled creatures join in a single song.

You feel the strangest sensation in your chest, a lightness tempered with fear and wonder. It is like nothing you have ever felt before.

Then suddenly, you know - like the angel, you are falling.


End file.
